NYTimes — Spinoza, Faith and Reason

Reasonable Doubt

THURSDAY marked the 350th anniversary of the excommunication of the
philosopher Baruch Spinoza from the Portuguese Jewish community of
Amsterdam in which he had been raised.

Given the events of the last week, particularly those emanating from
the Middle East, the Spinoza anniversary didn't get a lot of
attention. But it's one worth remembering — in large measure
because Spinoza's life and thought have the power to illuminate the kind
of events that at the moment seem so intractable and overwhelming.

The exact reasons for the excommunication of the 23-year-old Spinoza
remain murky, but the reasons he came to be vilified throughout all of
Europe are not. Spinoza argued that no group or religion could rightly
claim infallible knowledge of the Creator's partiality to its beliefs
and ways. After the excommunication, he spent the rest of his life
— he died in 1677 at the age of 44 — studying the varieties
of religious intolerance. The conclusions he drew are still of dismaying
relevance.

The Jews who banished Spinoza had themselves been victims of
intolerance, refugees from the Spanish-Portuguese Inquisition. The Jews
on the Iberian Peninsula had been forced to convert to Christianity at
the end of the 15th century. In the intervening century, they had been
kept under the vigilant gaze of the Inquisitors, who suspected the
“New Christians,” as they were called even after generations
of Christian practice, of carrying the rejection of Christ in their very
blood. It can be argued that the Iberian Inquisition was Europe's first
experiment in racialist ideology.

Spinoza's reaction to the religious intolerance he saw around him
was to try to think his way out of all sectarian thinking. He understood
the powerful tendency in each of us toward developing a view of the
truth that favors the circumstances into which we happened to have been
born. Self-aggrandizement can be the invisible scaffolding of religion,
politics or ideology.

Against this tendency we have no defense but the relentless
application of reason. Reason must stand guard against the self-serving
false entailments that creep into our thinking, inducing us to believe
that we are more cosmically important than we truly are, that we have
had bestowed upon us — whether Jew or Christian or Muslim —
a privileged position in the narrative of the world's unfolding.

Spinoza's system is a long deductive argument for a conclusion as
radical in our day as it was in his, namely that to the extent that we
are rational, we each partake in exactly the same identity.

Spinoza's faith in reason as our only hope and redemption is the core
of his system, and its consequences reach out in many directions,
including the political. Each of us has been endowed with reason, and it
is our right, as well as our responsibility, to exercise it. Ceding this
faculty to others, to the authorities of either the church or the state,
is neither a rational nor an ethical option.

Which is why, for Spinoza, democracy was the most superior form of
government — only democracy can preserve and augment the rights of
individuals. The state, in helping each person to preserve his life and
well-being, can legitimately demand sacrifices from us, but it can never
relieve us of our responsibility to strive to justify our beliefs in the
light of evidence.

It is for this reason that he argued that a government that impedes
the development of the sciences subverts the very grounds for state
legitimacy, which is to provide us physical safety so that we can
realize our full potential. And this, too, is why he argued so adamantly
against the influence of clerics in government. Statecraft infused with
religion not only dissolves the justification for the state but is
intrinsically unstable, since it must insist on its version of the truth
against all others.

Spinoza's attempt to deduce everything from first principles —
that is, without reliance on empirical observation — can strike us
today as quixotically impractical, and yet his project of radical
rationality had concrete consequences. His writings, banned and
condemned by greater Christian Europe, but continuously read and
discussed, played a role in the audacious experiment in rational
government that gave birth to this country.

The Declaration of Independence, that extraordinary document first
drafted by Thomas Jefferson, softly echoes Spinoza. John Locke,
Spinoza's contemporary — both were born in 1632 — is a more
obvious influence on Jefferson than Spinoza was. But Locke had himself
been influenced by Spinoza's ideas on tolerance, freedom and
democracy. In fact, Locke spent five formative years in Amsterdam, in
exile because of the political troubles of his patron, the Earl of
Shaftesbury.

Though Spinoza was already dead, Locke met in Amsterdam men who
almost certainly spoke of Spinoza. Locke's library not only included all
of Spinoza's important works, but also works in which Spinoza had been
discussed and condemned.

It's worth noting that Locke emerged from his years in Amsterdam a
far more egalitarian thinker, having decisively moved in the direction
of Spinoza. He now accepted, as he had not before, the fundamental
egalitarian claim that the legitimacy of the state's power derives from
the consent of the governed, a phrase that would prominently find its
way into the Declaration.

Locke's claims on behalf of reason did not go as far as
Spinoza's. He was firm in defending Christianity's revelation as the one
true religion against Spinoza's universalism. In some of the fundamental
ways in which Spinoza and Locke differed, Jefferson's view was more
allied with Spinoza. (Spinoza's collected works were also in Jefferson's
library, so Spinoza's impact may not just have been by way of
Locke.)

If we can hear Locke's influence in the phrase “life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness,” (a variation on Adam Smith's
Locke-inspired “life, liberty and pursuit of property”), we
can also catch the sound of Spinoza addressing us in Jefferson's appeal
to the “laws of nature and of nature's God.” This is the
language of Spinoza's universalist religion, which makes no reference to
revelation, but rather to ethical truths that can be discovered through
human reason.

Spinoza had argued that our capacity for reason is what makes each of
us a thing of inestimable worth, demonstrably deserving of dignity and
compassion. That each individual is worthy of ethical consideration is
itself a discoverable law of nature, obviating the appeal to divine
revelation. An idea that had caused outrage when Spinoza first proposed
it in the 17th century, adding fire to the denunciation of him as a
godless immoralist, had found its way into the minds of men who set out
to create a government the likes of which had never before been seen on
this earth.

Spinoza's dream of making us susceptible to the voice of reason might
seem hopelessly quixotic at this moment, with religion-infested politics
on the march. But imagine how much more impossible a dream it would have
seemed on that day 350 years ago. And imagine, too, how much even
sorrier our sorry world would have been without it.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is the author, most recently, of
“Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us
Modernity”.